April 16 2013 update to: 

Ongoing experience of TRYING to Network our
SAMIL River 5200TL-D Solar Inverter

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Details of the IES installation

 A very brief update to say I've now had two other Samil owners email me to share their similar stories with me.
To one of the senders I replied ...

It’s nice to know its not just me!

I too have been rung by MikeZhang and have this MASSIVE email trail between us.

He has taken my early reports to the devs and I too got told to use VIplant instead of the browser solution ... despite me explaining at-length that the inverter won’t even stay on the network long enough to use VIplant ... quite apart from my having already set up an account and tried VIplant with total non-success.

In short it doesn’t seem like they want to recognise they have a problem and keep telling me to upgrade the firmware using  “the latest” rar file which they emailed me which I can’t seem to get through to them appears to be an EARLIER version than what is on the replacement inverter I had swapped-in by my installer!!!!

Am I frustrated ... you bet I am!

Having paid as much as we have for a supposedly “automated” system which I have to manually record each day and even then with the second unit every so often it records some totally erroneous daily value like 0.04KW on a sunny day or conversely 53KW+ on a partially cloudy day when the best “real” value I’ve ever seen is like 39.37KW on a totally sunny day!

I can only hope you are right and with more voices Samil will finally try and fix the shonky firmware!

Do stay in touch and I’ll try and update the blog when I have new info

Please Tweet/Facebook/G+ about my blog to get the info out to other Samil owners

PS

I take it you did see all the pages I put up with all my research and findings?

http://ttlinkdiscussion.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/samil-generation-statistics-for-first.html

http://ttlinkdiscussion.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/march-10-2013-update-to-my-experience.html

http://ttlinkdiscussion.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/continuation-of-samil-update.html

http://ttlinkdiscussion.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/an-update-to-my-expierence-with-our.html

http://ttlinkdiscussion.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/my-experience-of-networking-our-samil.html

SAMIL^™and CSUN^™

Other posts relating to the IES

Post 3 

Post 2

Post 1
In response to some private inquiries and finally prompted by the comment left on this blog by Tony,
Here are the specs of our Inverter Energy System and a sample of the output thus far.

Before I go too much further I just want to give credit to SAMIL Power Australia.

They have been in contact with me in response to my service inquiries. First by  phone then multiple times via email and again by phone when the installer came to inspect the Inverter ... the subject of my next posting

The IES Installation Details

 As noted in previous posts the inverter is a SAMIL 5200TL-D which is a Dual tracking 5kw system

It is powered by 24x CSUN 250W (250-60M) 16% efficiency panels.


These are set up as 2 arrays, 1x 11 panels and 1x 13 panels.

They are set flat on a 'flat' roof at an angle of 7° to horizontal and facing in an East-North-east direction.
The reason for the low angle was my paranoia at having a large 'wind-sail' mounted on my roof during Queensland cyclones, so wanted to minimise the wind resistance. 

The main issues I see with this approach are:

1. Because the panels are flat, they will rapidly accumulate sediments through lack of run-off washing-effect during rains, and thus loose maximum efficiency, hence will require regular cleaning.
2. While they start power production soon after first-light, they tend to roll-off peak production somewhat earlier than I would have liked in the afternoons as the sun Westerns

The system was installed by BioSolar^TM and I'm pleased to say their contractors did an extremely professional and neat installation job.
They were recommended to me by a personal friend and I would equally recommend them to others.

IES Generation Details

As far as power generation goes, the easiest way to sum it up is with the spreadsheet I have been maintaining in the face of the hopeless reliability of all record-keeping associated with the SAMIL due to it's un-reliable internal logging, it's un-reliable LAN connectivity and the SolarPower Browser's un-reliability at recording data ^{(see next post)} ... at those times when it could actually get data from the SAMIL in a consistent fashion!
               All figures are in KWh